He often chooses instruments in order that his power
might be manifested otherwise it would seem that the good was done by the
clay rather than by the spirit. -- from the
archives of the American Catholic History Research Center.

Believe the incredible, and you can do the impossible.
It is our want of faith that holds us back, even as Peter.
When did he begin to sink? The Gospel gives us the reason. He took account
of the winds, he began reading some surveys; it was established
statistically that 99.44% of mankind cannot walk on water. All of the
incredulities were in the winds. When he took his eyes off Christ, Peter
began to sink.

Meditation

We become
like that which we love: If one loves the material, one
becomes like the material; if one loves the spiritual, one
is converted into it in his outlook, his ideals, and his
aspirations.
Given
this relationship between love and prayer,
it is
easy to understand why some souls say: "I have no time to
pray."

A higher form
of prayer than petition and a potent remedy against the
externalization of life-is
meditation. Meditation is a little like a daydream or a
reverie,
but
with two important differences: In meditation we do not
think about the world or ourselves, but about God; and
instead of using the imagination to build idle castles in
Spain, we use the will to make resolutions that will draw
us nearer to one of the Father's mansions. Meditation is a
more advanced spiritual act than "saying prayers"; it may
be likened to the attitude of a child who breaks into the
presence of a mother saying: "I'll not say a word, if you
will just let me stay here and watch you."

Meditation
allows one to suspend the conscious fight against external
diversions by an internal realization of the presence of
God. It shuts out the world to let in the Spirit.
It
surrenders our own will to the impetus of the divine will.

It silences the ego with its clamorous demands, in order
that it may hear the wishes of the divine heart. It uses
our faculties, not to speculate on matters remote from
God, but to stir up our will to conform more perfectly
with his will. It cultivates a truly scientific attitude
toward God as truth, freeing us from our prepossessions
and our biases so that we may eliminate all wishful
thinking from our minds. It eliminates from our lives the
things that would hinder union with God and strengthens
our desire that all the good things we do shall be done
for His honor and glory.

Meditation is not a petition, a way of using God, or asking
things from God, but rather a surrender, a plea to God that He
use us. (Go To Heaven)

Chistmas

What is Peace? Peace is the tranquility of
order...body to sour and of man to God.

There are two births of Christ. One unto this world in
Bethlehem, the other in the soul when it is spiritually
reborn..both result from a kind of Divine invasion.

What can I Give?
There is only one thin in the world that is really our
own--and that is our will...Our will is ours for all eternity.
That is why the most precious gift that one can give is
another in his will.

There were only two classes of people who
heard the cry Christmas night: shepherds and wise men.
Shepherds: those who know they know nothing. Wise men: those
who know they do not know everything. Only the very simple and
very learned discovered God -- never the man with one book.

The Christmas gift of peace was the uncoiling of the links
of a triple chain that first unites a person with God,
then with himself, then with
his neighbor. ("Peace" from Rejoice)

The Christmas secret of peace is giving this secret garden and
our whole human nature to God, as Mary gave Christ His human
nature. Christmas reminds us that the reason we are not as
happy

as saints is because we do not wish to be saints.
(Rejoice)

Why is the human heart shaped as it is?

The
human heart is not shaped like a valentine heart, perfect and
regular in contour; it is slightly irregular in shape as if a
small piece of it were missing out of its side. That missing
part may very well symbolize a piece that a spear tore out of
the Universal Heart of Humanity on the Cross, but it probably
symbolizes something more. It may very well mean that when God
created each human heart, He kept a small sample of it
in heaven, and sent the rest of it into the world of time,
where it would each day learn the lesson that it could never
be really happy, that it could never be really wholly in love,
that it could never be really whole-hearted until it rested
with the Risen Christ in an eternal Easter, until it went back
to the Timeless to recover the sample which God had kept for
it from all eternity.

The temptations of the saints were seen as opportunities for
self­discovery. They allowed temptations to show them the
breaches in the fortress of their souls, which needed to be
fortified until they would become the strongest points. This
explains the curious fact about many saintly people-that they
often become the opposite of what they once seemed to be.
(Lift Up Y our Heart)

The essence of
prayer is not the effort to make God give us something.
Prayer, then, is not just informing God of our needs,
for God
already knows them. Rather, the purpose of prayer is to give
God the opportunity to bestow the gifts He will give us when
we
are ready to accept them. (Go To Heaven)

Do we not say
that a person has a sense of humor if he can "see through
things" and do we not say that a person lacks a sense of humor
if he cannot "see through things"? But God made the world
according to such a plan that we were constantly to be "seeing
through things" to Him, the power, the wisdom, the beauty, and
the source of all that is.
In other
words, the material was to be a revelation of the spiritual,
the human the revelation of the divine, the fleeting and the
passing, the revelation of the Eternal.

(Moods And Truths)

The person who thinks only of himself says only prayers of
petition; the one who thinks of his neighbor says prayers of
intercession; whoever thinks only of loving and serving God
says prayers of abandonment to God's will, and this is the
prayer of the saints.

The degree of our
devotion and love depend upon the value that we put upon a
thing: St Augustine says, "Amor pondus meum"; love is the law
of gravitation. All things have their center.
The
schoolboy finds it hard to study, because he does not love
knowledge
as much as athletics.
Business
executives find it hard to think of heavenly pleasures because
they are dedicated to the filling of their "barn." The
carnal-minded find it difficult to love the spirit because
their treasure lies in the flesh. (Go To Heaven)

One can be
impolite to God, too, by absorbing all the conversation,
and by changing the words of Scripture from "Speak, Lord
Thy servant hears" to "Listen, Lord, Thy servant speaks."
God has things to tell us that will enlighten us-we
must wait for Him to speak.

The Lord
hears us more readily than we suspect; it is our listening
to God that needs to be improved. When people complain
that their prayers are not heard by God, what often has
happened is that they did not wait to hear
God's answer. . . .(Go To Heaven)

Nothing ever happens in the world that does not first
happen inside a mind. When one meditates and fills the
mind for an hour a day with thoughts and resolutions
bearing on the love of God and neighbor above all things,
there is a gradual seepage of love down to the level of
what is called the subconscious, and finally these good
thoughts emerge, of themselves, in the form of effortless
good actions.

Our thoughts make our desires, and our desires are the
sculptors of our days. The dominant desire is the
predominant destiny. Desires are formed in our thoughts
and meditations; and since action follows the lead of
desires, the soul, as it becomes flooded with divine
promptings, becomes less and less a prey to the
suggestions of the world.

There is a moment in every good meditation when the
God-life enters our life, and another moment when our life
enters the God­life.

It is never
true to say that we have no time to meditate; the less one
thinks of God, the less time there will always be for God.
The time we have for anything depends of how much we value
it.
Thinking determines the uses of time; time does not rule
over thinking. The problem of spirituality is never, then,
a question of time; it is a problem of thought.
For it
does not require much time to make us saints; it requires
only much love. (Go To Heaven)

God sets many angels in our paths, but often we know them
not; in fact, we may go through life never knowing that
they were agents or messengers of God to lead us on to
virtue, or to deter us from vice. But they symbolize that
constant and benign intervention of God in human history,
which stops us on the path to destruction or leads us to
success or happiness and virtue.(Guide To
Contentment)

Divinity is
always where you least expect to find it.

(The
Moral Universe)

Though time is too precious to waste, it must never be
thought that what was lost is irretrievable. Once the
Divine is introduced, the come the opportunity to make up
for losses. God is the God of the second chance.
(On Being Human)

A sick man who was brought to a hospital said to the good
nun in charge, "I haven't prayed in thirty years. Pray for
me." She said, "Pray for yourself. Sometimes the strange
voice is the one most

quickly heard." (Life
is Worth Living)

Prayer after Holy Communion -- My
thy body O Lord which I have received, and Thy Blood which
I have drunk -- Cleave to my inmost heart and may not
stain of sin remain in me whom this most pure and Holy
Sacrament has refreshed. Amen

Knowledge is acquired, wisdom is infused. Knowledge
comes from the outside; it is learned and absorbed. Wisdom
is infused, and comes to us an illumination...We need
wisdom to make big decisions, and the right answer comes
from God. Who has a destiny for us. God is longing to
fulfill it in us for the benefit of ourselves and others.
(On Being Human)

God -- He often chooses weak
instruments in order than His power might be manifested.
Otherwise it would seem that the good was done by the
clay, rather than by the Spirit.

Our error has been to separate the sacred
and the secular, the natural and the supernatural.....

....It does not take much time to make us
saints -- it takes only much love!

Love of enemies is actually the touchstone
to prove whether our love is truly divine. (Your Life
is Worth Living)

Prayer

Pray to the Holy
Spirit that you may know Christ in the fullness of His gospel
and the love of the Father that you may understand He is the
source of power, the Holy Spirit. Our Lord said, “I will send
you power from on high.”. Every day of my priestly life I pray
for the power of the Holy Spirit. The power that is not human,
not physical, not intellectual; rather a power coming solely from living the
Christ life, the power to influence people, the power to
impress you with the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

We
tell ourselves that we are not meant to be saints, yet we know
we are. Pray for us.
Your Life is Worth Living.
(pg249)

The
neighbor is the one who is inneed of your esteem. The saints
have more of our esteem than do sinners, but on this earth
charity must be guided by the greatness o either spiritual or
corporal misery. If two are in misery and equally needy , then
we can give to the one closest to us either by blood or by
friendship. (pg 292) YLIWL

What
is prayer? The best definition of prayer is that it is a
lifting of the mind and the heart to God. Prayer is a
dialogue. Manbreaks silence in two ways: a
dialogue with his fellow man and a dialogue with God.

“Prayer
is a lifting of the heart and mind to God; notice we said
nothing about the emotions…… Prayer is in the intellect, in
the will , and in the heart , as embracing a love of truth
with a resolve and determination to grow in love through and
act of the will.” (pg.336) YLIWL

“Often
in prayer we do not have a deep sense of God’s presence….but
we know He is there….Prayer is an interaction between the
created spirit and the uncreated Spirit, which is God. It is a
communion, a conversation, adoration, a penance, happiness, a
work, a rest, and asking, a submission” ( pg 337)
YLIWL

Why should we pray? Why breathe? We have to
take in fresh air and get rid of bad air; we have to take in
new power and get rid of old weaknesses. We pray because we
are orchestras and always need to unte-up. Just as a battery
sometimes uns down and needs to be charged, so we have to ve
renewed in spiritual vigor. Our blessed Lord said, “Without Me
you can do nothing.” (pg 337) (J&n 15:5)